Yes.
What I don't understand is what's the point of caring? The only dev of Voat, Putt, openly admitted to being burnt out and has completely removed himself from the community. I'd understand the passion for trying to stop these bots if there was an actual resolution that could be had. But as of right now Putt is MIA and all posts to "protect voat" are just farts in the wind.
I have to agree with you. I think this was a test.
A test?
I have been curious about bot manipulation for awhile now. But I actually have started to think bots aren't as distributive as individual manipulation. This lunatic has openly admitted to using 50+ alts to manipulate voat and has never seen consequences to his actions. And that's just one person, voat is riddled with individuals using alts to manufacture drama and division across voat. And I don't think these guys are paid. To me that's the future of voat, three guys with 50 alts each just talking to each other.
That's not entirely true. If you truly look at the behaviors of "protect voat" you'd see they were perculiar at best. When kevdude campaigned for Crensch to be the mod of "pizza gate" was odd. Instantly Crensch started banning thoughtful posts while letting every MK Ultra shit flow right through. There was something odd about those podesta emails. Pizzagate never really investigated it but instead all they did was fuck around with unrelated nonsense.
It was nothing good. The original chan posts raised some peculiar shit that should have been looked into. Everything that came after was autism.
Any of you guys remember that fake exodus that lasted like 2 days where all those users popped up and pretended to be old people? They all appeared, circlejerked to like 150 CCP, and went away. I'm pretty sure that's what building a votebot network looks like when they're not trying to hide it.
I'm sure this is something different, but there have been many large-scale bot ops on voat. Its the fact that this one is so obvious that makes me wonder what its about. Maybe just an IP address honeypot at that domain they keep linking? Like a shitty version of mh101?
Preview, no.
Review. Bots have been gaming Voat for a long time. Their behaviour is always changing, adapting, and growing.
Maybe it is becoming less subtle, but it's not 'coming'. It's already there.